Welcone to the Tronc Widgeteria
How much of the much-ballyhooed and much-ridiculed nerve center of Michael Ferro’s promised artificial intelligence empire can be found on the fourth, fifth and tenth floors of Wichita’s High Touch building on south Main Street?
SNT Media now produces much of the commercially oriented content for Ferro’s new tronc.com site – a site company insiders say SNT (for Social Networking Technology) created for the company. In addition, SNT has just announced a major hiring binge, saying it will add 80 engineers over the next year. At this reading, it’s unclear how much of the SNT build-out is oriented around Tronc’s new strategy. SNT hasn’t answered POLITICO’s inquiries about its relationship with tronc, or how much that relationship drives its current big build-out.
First published at POLITICO Media
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SNT’s site points to local NBC TV station websites and a list of several dozen smaller newspapers as clients. The Tribune, now tronc, newspaper properties are by far the biggest properties on that list.
For its part, Tronc chief digital officer Malcolm CasSelle would only say, in a POLITICO interview, “We have a bunch of providers, a bunch of different technologies we’re using. The content is being generated by machines. Well, they’re databases. They’re getting automatically generated and then we curate them and put them on the right pages.” Six weeks ago – just as “tronc” surfaced publicly, the local Wichita Eagle reported a deal between SNT and Tribune.
Whatever the current, or coming, depth of the relationship between SNT and tronc, we see clearly the first tangible steps of tronc’s strategy.
It’s more about the old art of web scraping and combing databases than it is about intelligent machines. So far, it’s a lot less fancy a concept than ”A.I.” would seem to portend.
Tronc’s trumpeting of machine learning and artificial intelligence has defined its resistance to the hostile acquisition attempted by Gannett. Further, it has won the newly rebranded company lots of hoots and hollers over the buzzwords running through Tronc’s recent unfurling of promotional videos on YouTube, which in turn have generated their own spoofs.
We now, though, can see the first proof of what CasSelle, and his bosses, Tronc chairman Michael Ferro and CEO Justin Dearborn, mean when they talk about multiplying content with machines. We see the beginnings of Ferro’s goal, as described by several who have heard him state it, to create an ad-friendly platform to be used not just by his company’s properties, but more widely across newspaper sites.
Readers can find the first fruits of the SNT-created products on ChicagoTribune.com. There, as ad spots on the business news pages, SNT’s Investkit product is displayed. Basically, SNT takes lots of freely available data from around the web, and puts it into an easy-to-glance-at visualization. Apple’s performance, for instance, is depicted via a number of colorful boxes. Or check out Oracle CEO Safra Katz’s total compensation. The company offers up its company profiles on the Fortune 500, but also on the smaller companies found uniquely in metro geographies. That localization serves as a tangible sales point for SNT in pitching its product.
Five-year-old SNT Media, which now houses about 80 employees, moved to Wichita from the Bay Area in 2015. The company first emphasized aggregation of business data and now offers a range of similar widgets on other topics. JoyfulHome and MyHouseKit offer up home listings, Zillow-like. HoopsLoyal covers basketball teams. SNT displays its three products prominently on its website.
Think of SNT as a widgeteria. Like other third-party data cruncher/aggregator/visualizer companies, it produces boxes that produce clicks.
SNT’s widgeteria produces USA Today-style factoid rectangles. They entice click-throughs. It’s a business model akin to that of high-flying Outbrain and Taboola, which have populated (or polluted) the web with click candy. Both those companies have perfected the dark art of getting many of us to click on scintillating graphics and headlines: “These Celebs Who Support Trump Left Us Speechless.”
The widgeteria notion: Use computers to round up as much free data as possible, fitting into modules around which advertising can be sold. Keep your costs very low, spin large numbers of page views and reap some benefits through the sale of programmatic advertising. It’s that concept that built Aggrego, launched by the Michael Ferro-led Wrapports in 2013. In fact, when Ferro left Wrapports and the Chicago Sun-Times behind, one of the first deals his new Tribune management did was with Aggrego, and, as I’ve reported, would now like to have Tronc buy it from Wrapports.
Call it machine learning if you want to stretch the definition, but it’s a kind of web scraping that’s been around for awhile. While it offers fundamental economic value – given how automated the process is – the strategy faces its own diminishing returns. As Google and Facebook increasingly dominate all digital advertising and programmatic rates correspondingly decrease, the value wrung from such automated pages is subject to serious downward pressure.
At this writing, though, the new tronc.com — with uncertain intentions to be its own destination site populated with content created by Tronc-owned properties — relies heavily on these SNT widgets. SNT-produced widgets populate every page of the current tronc.com.
(The only other ad to be found on the site, just below the widgets, is one from Radpad. That’s an L.A.-based rental apartment and house finder. Its lead investor is AllPoint Ventures, whose portfolio coincidentally also now includes tronc CTO Malcolm CasSelle’s former business, Timeline Labs. At issue since the beginning of Ferro’s Tribune tenure has been the company’s business dealings with companies formerly associated with the chairman or currently owned by his friends and associates. Those abstract concerns now finding a hearing in the Delaware courts. There, charges of Ferro’s self-dealing add color to two shareholder lawsuits that attempt to force the new Tronc board to negotiate a sale of the company to hostile suitor Gannett.)
How much will such widgets, produced by SNT or others, re-populate the Tribune newspaper sites? That’s one question the Tronc papers’ editors would like answered. Further, they ask privately, how much of the business, sports or other journalistic content (and those who produce it) could be replaced by such low-cost widgets?
As a technology to provide additive elements to the craft of local daily journalism, the widgeteria can play a role, though how much actual revenue they’ll produce is an open question.
Their allure is unquestionable. One industry pro who got the SNT Media pitch says the products are hard to turn down.
“They build profiles, match-ups, neighborhood profiles, anything that is data or statistical in nature and can be turned into brief or even mid-length narratives. It’s great for filling in sidebar elements and adding value for the publisher because it adds page views at no additional cost. If you look at HoopsLoyal.com, you’ll get the picture. You get millions of pages of content — no human beings necessary.”
